major arcana movie review

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‘Major Arcana’ and the Struggle to Overcome Who We Are

An interview with writer-director Josh Melrod and lead actor Ujon Tokarski on the dreamlike nature of cinema and the shared human experience.

Major Arcana (2018) tells the story of wandering carpenter Dink (Ujon Tokarski), who returns home to Vermont seeking redemption in the shadow of his alcoholism. As he builds a log cabin by hand, his desire to reconnect with Sierra (Tara Summers), a woman with whom he has a fractious relationship after his sudden departure from his home town, evokes a struggle between the man he wants to be and his past self.

The narrative feature directorial debut of Josh Melrod who, in 2012 co-directed with Tara Wray the documentary Cartoon College , about the two year programme run by The Center for Cartoon Studies at White River Junction, Vermont. In 2014 he edited Annie Silverstein’s short film Skunk , which was the recipient of the Cinefondation Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Gold Plaque for Best Student Short Film at the Chicago International Film Festival. In the same year, he also edited Marjorie Sturm’s The Cult of JT LeRoy . For lead actor Ujon Tokarski, Major Arcana is his first exposure to the filmmaking process.

In conversation with PopMatters ahead of the World Premiere at the Raindance Film Festival 2018, Melrod and Tokarski discuss the capacity for film to create connections through shared experiences, and their desire to not hold the audience’s hand, so to speak, but to allow them to come to their own conclusions.

In The Hero (2017), Sam Elliott describes a film as another persons dream. Would you agree, or is this is a romantic idea of cinema?

Josh Melrod : I strongly agree with that. When I think about where the basic idea for the movie comes from, I was inspired by this documentary ( Alone in the Wilderness , 2004) I had seen in bits and pieces over a period of years. It was about this guy called Dick Proenneke, who filmed himself on a 16mm camera in the late ’60s or early ’70s building a cabin in Alaska. He was just a very capable carpenter and it was fascinating to watch him chop down trees, hew logs and build a cabin.

So there was this idea in the back of my head that this would be something to build a film around. But in terms of where the meaningful part of the story comes, I came up with the idea during a two hour drive through Vermont. I was just sort of zoned out and I could see the beginning, the middle and the end, and a year later that became the script.

When I watched the movie last night in a theatre with the audience for the first time, it was very true to that original idea. I have thought many times how that just came fully formed into my head in a certain way, and how it is sort of dream like. Where and why inspiration strikes, why certain people feel compelled to share these things with other people is odd, and it’s unique to human beings. To me, that’s deeply associated with dreams, our sub-conscious and ego, and all sorts of other things.

Ujon Tokarski : In so far as the dream part of it, I think depicting someone else’s vision of what’s in their head is in a way dreamlike. My hope is that I can portray the character and his ideas accurately and effectively to get the message of what the story is, across [to the audience]. So yeah, I very much think the purpose of film is to give people an opportunity to enter an alternate reality. The hopes for the filmmakers and the actors is to create some kind of connection with what’s happening in their head, with their own experiences, and maybe even seeing themselves in a similar role.

Ray Bradbury said, “Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”

I share this thought that there is an unconscious dimension to writing, in which ideas and characters are given to you. Do you see yourself has having an absolute conscious control over the genesis of a story, and its development?

Melrod: I don’t know where ideas truly come from, just as I don’t know where the words, the thoughts in the answer to this question are going to lead me. When I look at the story now, I can see elements from my own life, inspirations for different characters. At the same time everyone has that, everybody daydreams and creates stories in one way or another. But then I like to give myself a little bit of credit that I thought to write it down, and struggle for over a year to write the script. I challenged myself that I was going to work on the script every single day until it was finished, and because I’m a film editor, I was doing that at night.

Sometimes I would put in a ten or eleven-hour day in front of a computer editing, and then I would say: “I haven’t done my writing today.” Somedays that meant I was writing one sentence just to fulfil the requirement that I had given myself. But the pushing of myself to write, it was a lot of work and it’s something I’m proud of having accomplished, and of course I worked on it long after I finished the first draft.

That effort is another part of it. So everybody has these ideas, and when you tell people you’re a filmmaker and that you are involved in movies, everybody says: “Oh, I have a great idea for a movie.” But it takes a lot to put forth that effort and make it into something. I don’t think it’s just as simple as that, but that’s what separates some people from being writers or painters, or whatever else. People will go to museums and say: “I could paint that.” But they didn’t, and so I think some people just feel drawn or compelled to create these things, and other people have things that fulfil them in their lives where they don’t feel the need to.

There are those films — such as blockbusters — that are pure escapism. Then you have other films that are more grounded in trying to replicate the human experience. Major Arcana is not the escapist type; rather, it’s intent is to take its audience into another world, to connect with another character. This is an example of cinema is about sharing an experience with a stranger as we come to learn about the character(s), while also learning about ourselves in the wake of their choices and experiences.

Melrod : One of the things I find interesting in stories is a degree of ambiguity. I get this sense that so much of what we see in movies, but also in the news and other media, the world is presented in terms that are very black and white. I feel like almost all of existence exists in a grey area. So that was something that felt very real, and human and natural to me, and I’m proud of the movie for successfully doing that.

Tokarski : The whole concept of dreaming and film — great storytelling is certainly always about existentialism and our place in humanity, or rather our process in humanity. It’s also said in history that there isn’t any human story that hasn’t been told, and what changes is the circumstances and the characters. In any of the great stories that are told, any human being can connect on some level to the experience as it relates to their own. What that does is it allows us to identify our human experience through someone else’s eyes, and through someone else’s circumstances, and maybe it gives us an opportunity to realise and connect on a higher level with what everybody is going through.

We are all subject to our own fallacies as humans and to joy and triumph, as well as the challenges. So yeah, a good film so much like the film we were able to create here, I think, does that. It unquestionably gives us the opportunity to see what our life is made of. Is it made up of a path that is laid before us, of the choices that we have been given and been able to make on that path? So yeah, I think it connects us all on a very fundamental level to the fact we are all dealing with the same situation, but a different circumstance.: The whole concept of dreaming and film — great storytelling is certainly always about existentialism and our place in humanity, or rather our process in humanity. It’s also said in history that there isn’t any human story that hasn’t been told, and what changes is the circumstances and the characters. In any of the great stories that are told, any human being can connect on some level to the experience as it relates to their own. What that does is it allows us to identify our human experience through someone else’s eyes, and through someone else’s circumstances, and maybe it gives us an opportunity to realise and connect on a higher level with what everybody is going through.

We are all subject to our own fallacies as humans and to joy and triumph, as well as the challenges. So yeah, a good film so much like the film we were able to create here, I think, does that. It unquestionably gives us the opportunity to see what our life is made of. Is it made up of a path that is laid before us, of the choices that we have been given and been able to make on that path? So yeah, I think it connects us all on a very fundamental level to the fact we are all dealing with the same situation, but a different circumstance.

Major Arcana requires patience from its audience. One can find themselves questioning the intent of the storytellers. As the story gradually unfolds, the time spent with Dink yields a moment of connection. This kind of ‘patient filmmaking’, however, forces to immerse ourselves more deeply, to look for that point of connection, which the lack of exposition is critical in forcing us to see.

Tokarski : The concept or the idea of ‘patient filmmaking’ is a concept or a terminology I’m not familiar with, but … it makes complete sense. In the process of being an actor and learning about making a film, and then watching it, I think you’re absolutely right. Audiences today want to be led in a direction; they want somebody to hold their hand and tell them that this is what this is about, and this is what it’s supposed to mean. But in this concept of ‘patient filmmaking’, the onus is on the audience, on each person to decide where this is going and to not be given all of the answers.

Interestingly enough, as I watch this film I’m not watching myself. I’m watching a character tell a story and in the beginning even I found myself wanting to know more quickly, where is this going to go? …When you sit back and you let yourself engage in the character’s process, of what he’s going through in his life, you’re led to your own conclusion of what it means. I think the greatest part about how it unfolds is that it’s a matter of choices. But the film means something different to each person, who through this process of slow filmmaking has to reach a conclusion on their own.

Melrod: It was definitely very intentional. I like all sorts of movies and I like a big budget Hollywood movie as much as anybody. I’m not hugely into experimental movies or things that push me too far from things that are familiar to me. I think I have a middle of the road aesthetic, but I’m definitely more drawn to stories where things aren’t laid out plain for you. So it was a very conscious decision to begin the film in a way where we don’t have much dialogue for the first seven or eight minutes, where you are just watching him go through the motions.

That last night when I watched the movie in a room with an audience for the first time, it was horrifying because I was like: Holy shit, we are going so deep into this. By minute five — when nobody has said anything and the room is quiet and people are just watching — it was scary for me. It felt good when the movie ended and people said that they liked it, just because it did feel very quiet and methodical in a certain way.

But I do know when I made the first assembly of the movie, we were fourteen minutes in before we got to the first scene with dialogue, and even for me that was pushing it a little too far. But I like this idea of things just unfolding and causing people to have to… I didn’t want people’s minds to wander. But I also wanted them to fall into a certain rhythm that the movie has, and that I hope is a little bit different than most of what they see, but not terribly so. I think the story should be fairly engaging, even if not a lot is said in the beginning.

Tokarski : It sort of reminds me of the idea that the interrogator that asks no questions, will get the most answers. I think that’s what this film does – by being quiet and not giving away a whole bunch of stuff in the beginning, it forces people to engage in a way that they start to answer the questions on their own…

Picking up on your point about the grey area, Fink and Sierra are characters that can both draw us in and push us away. Major Arcana lacks a tidy ending, with Dink’s journey up until that point the main point of reflection. Here’s a character that represents the individual leaving home to go out into the world, to seek self-discovery and understanding. There’s also a romanticisation of “place” where we, the audience, cannot be. Much of the film is about our tendency as humans to live life inside of our minds, which often contrasts starkly to the reality of our experiences.

Melrod : When I thought of the story and what appealed to me as I was working on the script, from that very first time that I came up with it, all of my thoughts were jumbled and chaotic. I don’t feel the same, not just from one day to the next, but from one minute to the next. When Ujon is answering your questions my mind wanders for a minute, where I can put myself in a foul mood, and it’s just all messy and chaotic. I don’t think that the pace in the movie is chaotic, but in the inner lives of the characters that does come through, where there’s all of this indecision and regret — especially in Tara’s performance.

There was a nice moment when I saw it on the big screen last night, and I had never seen the movie projected so large… It’s the morning after Sierra and Dink have slept together in the tent, where he goes inside the house and looks at himself in the mirror. When he comes outside, she’s waiting, leaning against the car and her performance is so beautiful to me because there’s so much, not regret exactly, but there’s so much going on in her face.

What I should say is there’s so much room for interpretation. That was a beautiful moment, because it was finally projected on the big screen, I could really see it, and I felt it strongly.

It’s just this idea that our thoughts are messy and the sanest of us aren’t that sane. So I feel pride that it came through. Afterwards when people were coming up to speak with me, everybody had a different impression. They were all true, they were all things I agreed with and it wasn’t like anybody said something that would make me respond, “Well that’s not what I meant.” They were all different, but they all fell into things I had thought about before, and so I’m really proud of that.

Tokarski : Similar to Josh, the juxtaposition that you present is an interesting part of our human nature. When we have expectations about anything, essentially what we’re doing is were setting ourselves up for failure, or to be disappointed that it didn’t turn out the way that we wanted it to. Or the vision in our mind was completely different than what we thought would happen, and the film definitely depicts that as well.

Here are people that are struggling with who they are as a person, and how other people see them. I’m constantly caught in that struggle of wanting people to see me this way because they see me that way. So yeah, that comes through clearly in the film, and that’s what the constant human struggle is – this is who I am and this who I want people to think that I am. But it’s all based on expectations, so how can anything be right or wrong?

Filmmaker Christoph Behl remarked to me: “You are evolving, and after the film, you are not the same person as you were before.” Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the creative process, and should the experience of watching a film offer the audience a transformative experience?

Melrod : A lot of the film is about struggling to overcome who we inherently are, and that’s something that… I struggle with. I would love the opportunity to make another film in part just to put into action the things I learned making this one. So it was a learning experience that was incredibly transformative, but in terms of who I am as a person, I don’t feel like I changed as much as I would like to change, or to grow as much as I would like to grow.

In terms of sitting through a film, I do think it should be a transformative experience for people in some way, whether it’s just to make them laugh or cry, or have their attention diverted for a time. I think a necessary component of a successful film is that people are transported away, and hopefully they come out a little bit different on the other side.

Tokarski : Similarly for me, the whole experience of making a film was transformative in the fact that I’ve never been exposed to any of this stuff. So it transformed my understanding of how films are made and what the process involves, and added to my repertoire of skills as a person, and it definitely broadened my horizons. In some sense that’s what you would expect would happen in an audience if a good story is relatable; to the point that it might not be transformative in a way that is very profound, but it definitely should add some perspective to someone’s life, to where they have a broader sense or have an ability to relate to other people. So yeah, I think [ Major Arcana ] is transformative to some degree for everyone that is exposed.

• Major Arcana (2018) - IMDb
• Major Arcana Movie

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Major Arcana Reviews

This quietly compelling film, thought weirdly titled (Google its Tarot card connection), convincingly charts a man moving beyond a legacy of addiction.

Full Review | Nov 7, 2020

In a time period without any shortage of troubles, it's therapeutic to watch someone attempt to build a new life out of the collapsed mess of an old one, regardless of whatever life unexpectedly throws in the way.

Full Review | Oct 26, 2020

There's an intimacy to this film that's difficult to achieve and the fly-on-the-wall aesthetic Melrod creates effectively underscores the power of Dink's plight and ultimately, the poignancy that develops around it. Quiet, but memorable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Oct 16, 2020

When you're looking for ways to support your local cinema through a virtual rental, look to options other than Major Arcana.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 10, 2020

Slight yet sharply observed, this evocative redemption story is more emotionally impactful than its easygoing vibe would suggest.

Full Review | Oct 9, 2020

"Not the precious object it might first appear; the film has a goofed-up strain of humor and a great ear for hostile dialogue."

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 9, 2020

Made in Vermont on a budget of pennies and a wealth of soon-to-be-discovered talent.

Tokarski, an actual carpenter who had never acted before Major Arcana, has a natural, unforced presence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 8, 2020

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October 07, 2020 On Screen » Movie+TV Reviews

Vermont Filmmaker Josh Melrod Makes an Impressive Debut With 'Major Arcana' 

Published October 7, 2020 at 10:00 a.m.

• Courtesy Of Good Deed Entertainment

LUCK OF THE DRAW Rekindling a romance proves challenging for a man trying to rebuild his life in Melrod's Vermont-made film.

Our streaming entertainment options are overwhelming — and not always easy to sort through. This week, I preview a Vermont-made film from Barnard director Josh Melrod. Major Arcana will be screened at Montpelier's Savoy Theater on Thursday, October 8, 7 p.m., followed by a Q&A with Melrod and stars Ujon Tokarski (also of Barnard) and Tara Summers. Reserve tickets for the limited-attendance event at savoytheater.com .

After that, the movie will be streamable from the Savoy's virtual cinema through October, one of a slew of such engagements around the country.

After years on the road, a carpenter named Dink (Tokarski) returns to his Vermont hometown. His father has recently died, leaving him 54 acres, a decent wad of cash, and a trailer crammed with overflowing ashtrays and junk.

One of the first things Dink does is remove his dad's six-pack of beer from the fridge and pour it down the drain. That accomplished, he leaves the trailer, pitches a tent in the woods and starts felling trees to build a cabin of his own.

Dink's long days of labor get less solitary and more complicated when he reconnects with an old flame, Sierra (Tara Summers), who works at the general store and reads tarot on the side. While he's serious about his sobriety, she drinks — a lot. And she's not happy with the abrupt way he left her last time. Is romance in the cards, or just more heartbreak?

Will you like it?

Want to watch a guy hang out in the woods and build a cabin from scratch? What if it's more interesting than I just made it sound? Major Arcana is basically a two-character drama and for long stretches a solo one, with leisurely scenes of Dink turning tree trunks into beams or raising the cabin's frame. And it's oddly mesmerizing, whether you're into carpentry or not.

While the movie is, to a degree, about a man struggling with the demons of his past, it's more about the joy and restorative power of working to create something from nothing. Tokarski, an actual carpenter who had never acted before Major Arcana , has a natural, unforced presence. While Dink is moody and sometimes despairing, we get the sense that he always feels better when he's working with his hands.

The movie views Dink head-on, without romanticizing his status as a lone woodsman, and it treats his relationship with Sierra the same way. A TV veteran with a résumé that includes "Boston Legal" and "Damages," Summers somehow looks perfectly at home working the counter of a small-town general store. Sierra's sly wit and grounded presence seem like exactly what Dink needs — until we learn that "getting hammered" is a way of life for her.

While Sierra is still angry at the drunk Dink used to be, the sober Dink unsettles her on a deeper level. In its quiet way, the movie hints at the difficulty of breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty and addiction. Dink's strung-out mom (Lane Bradbury) wants to get her hands on his inheritance so she can gamble it away, but even she isn't a villain so much as a cautionary reminder of who he used to be.

This is the first narrative feature for Melrod, who codirected the 2012 documentary Cartoon College (about the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction), and his extensive editing background serves him well. Slow and contemplative as it is, Major Arcana never gets bogged down. Melrod makes spare, lyrical use of the Vermont landscape — neon-green maples, mist rising from a lake — without hiding the darker side of rural living. If you care about homegrown cinema, check out this promising debut.

If you like this, try...

Build the Wall (2020; Vimeo): I reviewed this no-budget drama from "mumblecore" pioneer Joe Swanberg in August. Shot in Hardwick, Vt., it also features a guy hanging out in the woods and painstakingly building something — in this case, a traditional stone wall.

Her Smell (2019; HBO Max, rentable): Here's a movie about the struggle to stay sober in a whole different milieu. Elisabeth Moss won critical acclaim as a '90s punk queen in a movie that Recovery Unplugged calls "a very real depiction of the hardships with which many active and recovering addicts are faced."

"Rectify" (2013-16; Netflix, rentable): In this quietly powerful SundanceTV series, Aden Young plays a man trying to rebuild his life after 20 years on death row. I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone who likes thoughtful, slow-burn dramas like Major Arcana .

The original print version of this article was headlined "Major Arcana"

Related Locations

Daysies pick savoy theater.

• 26 Main St. , Montpelier Barre/Montpelier VT 05602
• 44.25906 ; -72.57655
• www.savoytheater.com

Tags: Movie Reviews , The Savoy Theater , Video

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Major Arcana

By Bradley Gibson | May 22, 2019

In Major Arcana Dink (Ujon Tokarski) is a carpenter by trade, but life has left him rudderless and he drifts from job to job. After living in Canada for several years, he returns to his backwoods hometown in Vermont on the occasion of his father’s death. An alcoholic from a family of alcoholics, he’s recently sober and trying to avoid booze. His intentions are tested when he sees an old flame, Sierra (Tara Summers), and his previous life collides with his new one.

His father left him land, a little money, and a ramshackle hovel that’s little more than a trash heap with a roof. He comes back to town primarily to collect the inheritance. Part of it being a large tract of land means he has some vested interest in staying. Picking through the detritus of an abandoned life, he grabs a chainsaw and walks off into the woods. With little more than the saw, some hand tools, and intricate skill at woodworking, he begins to build a cabin.

“… alcoholic from a family of alcoholics, he’s recently sober and trying to avoid booze… “

You really can’t go home again. Dink has an image in his mind of the town and its people from four years ago. He’s looking for that place. The townies, conversely, are expecting him to be the man who left. Of course, towns change. People change. Director Josh Melrod captures the ennui of this displacement beautifully. Dink left in a hurry before and never wrote home. Sierra and his mother ( Lane Bradbury ) wondered for years why he left, and where he went, and they have simmered in that resentment. Everyone involved is vaguely uncomfortable with a situation that should be familiar but has changed in unexpected ways.

Every object and person in the film is disheveled and filthy. Watching Dink put this world back on like a greasy old shirt leaves a viewer craving a long, hot shower. Contrasted with this grime is the pristine, pastoral cabin. In that clearing in the woods, he transforms into a precise artisan, adept and effortlessly confident. This craftsman builder is a very different man from the unkempt vagabond he seems to be the rest of the time. Watching him settle into this clean, clear mode is very satisfying. His mind is orderly, his task definite. He cuts down the trees, makes the boards, and builds the cabin using a precise mortise and tenon style. There is art in his method as well as in apprehension of the final artifact, a manifest testament to a person who has fully mastered this one aspect of life.

“ The dissonance between old and new expectations, and the nuanced, un-processed changes from the years…”

The walking ghost that haunts him is Sierra. While he didn’t come back for her, once he sees her his old feelings come up again, and he begins to pursue her. She doesn’t mesh with the new model sober man anymore. She’s still drinking, and though he wants her, he can’t quite figure out how to be with her now.

Sierra has taken up tarot reading, and the film title is from the archetype cards in her deck. She reads Dink’s fortune, generically prognosticating based on textbook meanings of the cards, but he interprets the readings as portending a future with her, disregarding their troubled past, and current divergent paths. The dissonance between old and new expectations, and the nuanced, un-processed changes from the years between them, on top of her resentment over him leaving, sets the stage for an inevitable collision of then and now.

Of particular note is the music. Tokarski can sing and does justice to that high lonesome bluegrass sound, and the soundtrack serves the materially fluently with songs from Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody.

Major Arcana works on every level to convey the sense of a place in slow decay, and the sad futility of an attempt to find some familiar hope in the crash site of a former life.

Major Arcana (2019) Written and directed by Josh Melrod. Starring Ujon Tokarski, Tara Summers, Lane Bradbury.

9 out of 10

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In Major Arcana, a drifter carpenter returns home to build a new life out of his messy old one

Major Arcana

Starring Ujon Tokarski and Tara Summers. Screening at Vancity Theatre at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday (October 27). Streaming online at VIFF Connect until November 22.

The act of creating something out of nothing is always hypnotizing and that works in the favour of the low-key debut feature drama Major Arcana by writer-director Josh Melrod. A drifter named Dink (Ujon Tokarski) returns from some obscure place called British Columbia to the backwoods of Vermont to collect what his late father left him: a pigsty of a home, a stash of cash, and 52 acres of land.

That’s not all that awaits him though—there’s also his resentful former flame (Tara Summers), whom he abandoned to wander across the West Coast, as well as his cantankerous mother (Lane Bradbury), who wants a share of the money.

Amidst his own toxic stew of relationships, he commences the construction of a cabin with little more than his carpentry expertise and focussed determination. Watching him fell trees and build the structure bit by bit serve as a central focal point and a metaphor for his attempt to turn his life around.

Although he’s two years sober, his alcoholic ex-girlfriend, still sore for his unexplained disappearance from her life, is a troubling temptation who could derail him. She’s since taken up tarot card reading, which the film’s title refers to. The Major Arcana are the trump cards of the pack that represent life, death, and rebirth, and can also mean secrets and mysteries.

Dink is attempting to undergo a rebirth but he’s also a man full of secrets and remains a mystery to those around him. There’s much backstory hinted at, with some explained but never fully explored. Consequently, we never fully get to understand what makes Dink (or his demons) tick—but for a man who doesn’t know himself, that seems true to life. But similarly so, as he advances towards his goal, obstacles arise but never fully coalesce into any narrative impact. Yet in a time period without any shortage of troubles, it’s therapeutic to watch someone attempt to build a new life out of the collapsed mess of an old one, regardless of whatever life unexpectedly throws in the way.

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Major Arcana

Where to Watch

Ujon Tokarski (Dink) Tara Summers (Sierra) Lane Bradbury (Jean) Rachel Donahue (Molly) Collen Doyle (Craig)

Josh Melrod

A long-troubled itinerant carpenter returns home to small town Vermont and attempts to build a log cabin by hand, hoping to free himself from a cycle of poverty and addiction.

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Major Arcana

Movie information.

One of the best things about indie narrative films is that they tend to mirror life in raw and uncanny ways. But in Major Arcana , these qualities are so pronounced that viewers who seek films primarily for escapism and entertainment could find themselves emotionally overwhelmed.

From the outset, the drama by Josh Melrod (a veteran editor, making his writing/directing debut) features an unmistakably palpable sense of sorrow that slivers through each mostly dialogue-free frame. Enhancing this tone is a rustic, squalid vibe and a main character, Dink (Ujon Tokarski), who seems especially resigned and quietly tortured.

Back in his small Vermont hometown after a sudden, unannounced four-year absence, Dink endures the scorn of those still upset by his surprise departure, namely his family and his ex, Sierra (Tara Summers). Having received his own surprise in the form of 53 acres and 15 grand, willed to him by his recently-deceased father, he puts his carpentry skills to work and begins building a cabin on his new land.

When not hammering nails, Dink pounds away at his inherited alcoholic demons, most of which come courtesy of his mother, Jean (Lane Bradbury), who seems to genuinely loathe herself, her son and her dead spouse. The few times when Tokarski and Bradbury share a space, we witness their characters’ strong disdain for one another. And in these moments, it’s abundantly clear why Dink ran away — and why he now feels a deep need for genuine change — though these intense exchanges also provide a good deal of welcome dark comic relief. Here and elsewhere, the actors seem so honest and believable that it almost made my very aura sweat and cry.

Major Arcana begins a bit slow and dark but piques one’s interest more as time progresses. Although this film did not leave me feeling warm or overjoyed, I would watch it again for the realism alone.

Available to rent starting Oct. 9 via fineartstheatre.com

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West Oceanfront Magazine

A Newport Beach Lifestyle Publication

Film Review: Major Arcana

By Lexi Rafael

It’s somewhat awkward at first for the busy, modern mind to slow down and catch onto the rhythm of Major Arcana . This is a visual poem, unconcerned with a strict adherence to standard film formula. There’s no high drama, no edge-of-your-seat stakes. Instead, we’re faced with a rather quiet story. A man who’s trying to move on from past mistakes returns to his hometown and attempts to build a better future for himself, literally, by constructing a cabin in the woods with his bare hands.

For the first eight minutes of Major Arcana , the story unfolds in silence: An old pick-up truck pulls up to a run-down house in the woods. A man, who we will soon learn is our protagonist, Dink, gets out of the car with a large knapsack in tow and enters the house. A fly buzzes about the dirty kitchen. In the bedroom, a sea of crumpled clothes covers the floor. Dink opens a drawer to reveal a pack of naked lady playing cards. Back in the kitchen, he checks the fridge: beer, mayonnaise, and more beer. He takes out a six pack, cracks open every single beer and proceeds to pour all six down the drain at once. It seems he can’t help but pour himself a quick handful, but moments after slurping it up, he spits it all out.

Over the course of the film, we watch as Dink moves between two very different worlds. Alone in nature, working on his cabin, he is clearly in his element. Here life is simple, straightforward. We get to share in Dink’s pleasure in the perfect squeeze of cheese-whiz, the refreshing rinse in a stream, the delight in lying back beneath the stars. But people are not so easy for Dink. His mother is verbally abusive and his ex-girlfriend, Sierra, isn’t much better. Although Dink shares that he quite purposefully hasn’t had a drink in a long time, Sierra pressures Dink to give up his sobriety. For most of the film, Dink is entangled in the snare of this woman and dreams of a future with her for reasons we can’t quite understand, and yet of course we do. It’s a truth painfully familiar for many: All too often the heart grows attached to people who only seem to cut us down.

We start to long for Dink’s moments alone, for the gentle space the woods provides. Out there, there’s no judgement. He’s free to chop wood, drink water, make a loud noise. This feels good. This feels right. It speaks to something rooted deep inside, that part that knows it can breathe a full sigh of relief when out alone, surrounded by nothing but trees and sky.

Catch Major Arcana at the Newport Film Festival this Wednesday, May 1 at 8 pm. A live Q&A with Writer/Director Josh Melrod will follow the screening.

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Major Arcana

Cast & crew.

Lane Bradbury

Rachel Donahue

Collen Doyle

Tara Summers

Ujon Tokarski

• Average 6.8

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Review: In Major Arcana , Momentary Beauty Is Lost in Clunky, Poorly Acted Independent Drama

• October 10, 2020
• Film , Film & TV , Review

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Lisa Trifone

The extremely difficult realisation

Review: MAJOR ARCANA by John Pistelli

Art for life's sake.

John Pistelli’s serialised-on-Substack novel opens with what Camus called the only truly serious philosophical question. 1 2 A male student in an oversized army jacket shoots himself in the head with a vintage revolver; a classmate films the incident and whispers Quod Erat Demonstrandum .

This major (but by no means arcane) novel is Pistelli’s own attempt at a Q.E.D. of the proposition that, despite the anaemic state of officially sanctioned contemporary literature, one can write imaginatively about the present. 3 In my opinion, the proof succeeds.

Major Arcana celebrates artifice while abjuring obscurantism (for the midwits among us, Pistelli tells us exactly what he is up to 4 by including both a Preface and a Foreword to the Preface of the Proem of the Novel of the Future 5 and by providing running commentary on Substack and Tumblr). He makes full use of the serialised format: each chapter, evocatively titled and carefully bounded, can be savoured on its own, perhaps even shuffled at random (especially in its audio form, as the author doubles as a gifted voice over artist). 6 The ethics of the novel similarly evokes an earlier model of la littérature engagée with its richly inventive backstories for characters that could otherwise have been simple mouthpieces for this or that theory of art and the unsparing attention paid to the not-always-creative destruction wrought by technological and cultural change.

Concurrently, the boundaries of the novel, like that of the soul, are porous: events from cyberspace seep into the story and one has the sneaky suspicion that the occult forces that have been summoned may already have escaped into consensus reality. Unlike other “Internet novels”, this book (or whatever) doesn’t simply wallow in the anomie and anhedonia that predictively results from shackling oneself to a particular hellsite, lol, 7 but swallows the Internet whole, with room to spare for the world before it, and God willing, the world thereafter.

After the climactic opening sequence, 8 we are slowly introduced to a colourful suite of characters to explain (or fail to explain) why Jacob Morrow, that beautiful boy, decided to sacrifice himself; and why Ash del Greco, that weird-looking girl (or whatever) with the spiral scar on her face, decided to film the scene to prove a point.

First up, in a brief but hilarious satire of 21st century campus life, we meet the self-mythologizing Simon Magnus, former countercultural comic book author and current adjunct lecturer of Studies in the Graphic Novel , who gave up writing comics, gave up writing anything really, after the bloody genesis of Simon Magnus’s magnum opus Overman 3000 .

One half expects Simon Magnus to start a YouTube channel destroying the arguments of the insufferable enbies in Simon Magnus’s classroom in a building that is literally called “the Cathedral” 9 but instead Simon Magnus decides to beat they/them at they/their own game and destroy the very idea of gender identity through a reductio ad absurdum by first suggesting that everyone should be referred to as they/them regardless of personal preference before insisting that, actually, now that Simon Magnus thinks about it, Simon Magnus would prefer not to be referred to by any pronouns at all — a request which the narrator scrupulously honours, effectively illustrating how the necessary hubris of the artist is often difficult to distinguish from the male sense of entitlement to act like a dick. But the administrative empire strikes back, placing Simon Magnus on leave pending an investigation by the sinisterly named non-profit Community Harvest into possible trigger points in Simon Magnus’s oeuvre that might have contributed to Simon Magnus’s student’s self-harm or self-slaughter (or whatever we are now supposed to call suicide).

The tone shifts abruptly but effectively from comic to tragic as Jessica Morrow, our first lady of sorrows, looks back on her life in a hopeless attempt to understand why she, who had tried so hard to be the loving and nurturing parent that she had never had, had nevertheless failed in her basic responsibility of keeping her beloved Jakey alive. Then follow several other stories of characters trying to escapee lonely childhoods and broken homes through literature and art (and other less wholesome means), with the most harrowing of all being that of Valerie Karns, reaching such Dostoevskyian depths that one can’t help but wonder whether Pistelli is of the devil’s party without knowing it. 10

In Simon Magnus’s retelling of Simon Magnus’s personal myth, however, Valerie Karns is reduced to “the mysterious figure who had initiated Simon Magnus into the mystery before disappearing into it herself”. 11 It is Valerie Karns who introduces Simon Magnus to the tarot and to magic and to Aleister Crowley with his motto of “Love is the law, love under will”, of which she will retain only the first clause in her final red message. In the novel, magic possesses a certain (dare I say capitalist) efficiency: you may very likely get what (you think) you want, but it comes at a cost. 12

If this makes the novel sound like a quantum entanglement of trauma plots, fear not. It explores not only the depths but also the breadths and heights of human experience. Neither biology nor sociology is taken as destiny. Words and images have the power to trap the characters but also to set them free. Conversations, even arguments, are sources of entertainment and instruction. Take for example the following exchange between Simon Magnus’s lover, a lapsed Catholic aesthete, and Simon Magnus’s visual artist collaborator on Overman 3000 , a Stalinist Jew:

“I was raised Catholic,” she said to him one night in the bar after a moment’s silence. “The whole fucking religion is a graven image. That’s the only good thing about it! Otherwise, it’s old men in dresses telling you not to have any fun while they eye up the altar boys. The sermons would put you to sleep, but you could always stay awake by looking at the stained glass windows—the way they colored the light that came through them and spangled the backs of the people in the pew in front of you—and those sadomasochistic reliefs of the Stations of the Cross on the wall, all that flogging and bleeding of the beautiful male body, like something out of Mishima.”  Her eyes glassed over in reverie as she dragged on her cigarette. “Well, there you go,” he said. He raised his beer glass and slammed it down to re-seize her attention, rattling the fruity wine in her flute. “You were missing the parables, the allegories, the commandments—distracted by some goddamn sex fantasy.”

Pistelli’s keen sense of humour prevents the narrative from ever descending into mere didacticism, but something of the Invisible College lecturer nevertheless shines through: attempting to convey not facts or arguments, but sensibilities — ways of seeing, if you will. Perhaps the most important lesson is the ability to read the world as fiction, which is not to say that the outside world doesn’t exist, but that there is a lot more to the real than the unimaginative mind is capable of perceiving. Wittgenstein said: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” Or, as Ash del Greco, in her incarnation as virtual manifestation coach, told her customers:

If you change the way you think about the past so radically that it changes the effect the past has on you—how is that not magic?

The transparent refictionalisation of existing fictional characters (Overman, Ratman, The Fool, Sparrow, Marsh Man) reveals the archetypal nature of the overfamiliar brands and franchises which have become dead metaphors. 13 Nevertheless, one does not have to be a fan of comic books to enjoy the narrative. 14 In Simon Magnus’s youthful musings about the proper relationship between tradition and innovation, you could replace ‘comics’ with any popular art form:

Alone, Simon Magnus might have found the comics too simplistic and banal to hold much attention and the classics too antique and convoluted to move the body and the soul. Together, however, the one set of books fertilized the other. Simon Magnus felt through the comics’ crude images something of the passion and despair Milton, Shelley, and Dostoevsky meant to convey, while discovering at the same time, through the classics’ elevated diction and thematic grandeur, the ideals those superheroes manifested for a popular audience in the present.   

After the fateful quickening of Overman 3000 , and of Ash del Greco, we return to the present, more or less. The skewering of gender pieties, language policing and Covid protocols are familiar, although of course we’re used to seeing it from pseudonymous chaos magicians, rabid right-wingers and reactionary centrists, rather than intellectually and morally serious writers whose aims transcend the political. 15

Pistelli is not attempting to redpill his audience — nor to blackpill them or pinkpill them or to feed them whatever pill the cool kids are taking these days. In fact, in our pharmacotopian era, he dares to suggest that ingesting a chemical (government issued or otherwise) may not be the most advisable route to true insight. I’d go further, though, and call the novel’s guiding ethos anti-enlightenment: if by enlightenment is meant a binary transition from illusion to reality, from dreaming to wakefulness, from darkness to light.

The novel’s (non)duality is most clearly illustrated by the parallel gender journeys of Ash del Greco and her high school friend Ari Alterhaus. Ari Alterhaus attempted (with enthusiastic parental support) to literally excise the gendered aspects of their anatomy by means of hormones and surgery only to end up as a Catholic convert and detransitioner. For Ash del Greco, however, dysphoria about her (or whatever) gendered body was but a small part of her general dissatisfaction with her corporal existence, which she quickly realised could not be assuaged by dictating how others should refer to her in the third person. Having already undergone much more fundamental transformations, she foresees:

She would never detransition because she would never cease to transition. Her whole life was nothing but transition.

A hostile reader could question why, in the current political climate, Pistelli chose to make this point by bringing to life the fever dreams of the likes of Wesley Yang and Mary Harrington , when other examples of techgnosis abound. But in his artful response to cultural developments that have evidently deranged many otherwise intelligent observers, Pistelli offers an alternative to both leftwing and rightwing censoriousness. We would all be wise to heed this lesson, since the 21st century isn’t likely to become any less weird.

Contra Crowley and the young Simon Magnus, 16 the narrative suggests that we do not need to push ourselves to ever further extremes to find the truth, that there may yet lie great wisdom in the pragmatic pluralism of William James: a willingness to give a fair hearing to both missionaries and visionaries, to prophets and perverts and freaks, without renouncing the ordinary (dare I say bourgeois) delights offered by friendships, old books, babies and dogs. 17 18

The novel communicates a vision of life as a deck of cards, endlessly shuffled and reshuffled: the same images occurring again and again in different combinations. In the end, though, it is not the surprising correspondences cooked up by chance and fate that bring meaning to successive readings, but the growing ability of the reader to notice the patterns unfold.

Disclaimer: I don’t know John personally, but he has been exceedingly generous in encouraging my paltry attempts at fan fiction own forays into more imaginative writing. To maintain a veneer of objectivity, I will refer to him/them as Pistelli in the body of the text and as John in the footnotes. I will also attempt to restrict any spoilers, wilful misreadings and unnecessary digressions to the notes.

Empirically, however, it seems the question of suicide is rarely resolved philosophically. Emile Cioran, author of such life-affirming works as The Trouble with Being Born , lived to the ripe old age of 84; Sylvia Plath, hardly unread in Nietszche, called it quits at 30.

Meanwhile, our greatest living philosopoher continues to be disappointed in the unsocratic attitudes of the demos.

Fortunately, John is no philosopher.

I have in mind Murdoch’s distinction between fantasy and imagination (from The Sublime and the Good ):

Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination […] Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.

Or does he?

You might have got a bit carried away there, John.

The first and final chapters are appropriately numbered zero and infinity, like a classic tarot deck. I have tried and failed to discern any further numerological significance in the remaining forty-eight chapters.

Future poet-historians will perhaps rhapsodise that John’s decision not to join Twitter was a pivotal moment in the preservation of Western civilisation.

What the kids call a ‘reverse date’.

Mencius Moldbug, eat your heart out.

Since I used to blog under that name, let me play devil’s advocate for a bit.

Nothing in the novel, not the interesting conversations about art, not the making of art, not the repeated exhortations to read Shakespeare and Austen — and certainly not the senseless human sacrifice of Jacob Morrow (not so edifying in real life , is it?) — can redeem the repeated rape of Valerie Karns. The following is the clearest image of truth in the novel:

Simon Magnus wrote a two-page spread that showed, non-sequentially, a cascade of sodomy: The Fool’s father doing to the young Fool what The Fool would go on to do to Sparrow, and the father’s father doing the same, and the father’s father’s father, until he was ordering the artist to draw buggery in Pilgrim times. This Ellen Chandler and Frank Donofrio might have countenanced, but Simon Magnus also wanted to show the grown-up Sparrow assaulting his own young son, and that son assaulting his son, and on into the future, until we were to see sodomy on the rings of Saturn a million years hence, all of this shuffled and disordered, the Pilgrim abutting the alien, like a Tarot pack.

Everything else is just pseudochristian cope.

For a person without gender, Simon Magnus’s treatment of Simon Magnus’s muses is suspiciously reminiscent of that of a stereotypical male artist.

One may wonder whether we really need another retelling of Faust, but this is evidently one of those lessons that humanity is incapable of learning. I can’t resist referring again to Murdoch’s famous description in The Sea, The Sea , which John has also highlighted :

All spirituality tends to degenerate into magic, and the use of magic has an automatic nemesis even when the mind has been purified of grosser habits. White magic is black magic. And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition. Yet how does it happen? Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.

But John attempts to do one better than Murdoch. Due perhaps to her strong commitment to moral realism, Murdoch discusses magic but rarely depicts it (apart from vague apparitions like the sea monster that may or may not be an acid flashback). John, on the other hand, relishes the chance to imagine an apocalyptic vision sponsored by MKULTRA 3000.

John appears to share Jung’s belief that we cannot simply dismiss the forces of unreason as products of folk tales and superstitions that the New Man will someday outgrow. Nor should we succumb uncritically to their dark embrace. We need to work creatively to integrate them into our understanding of the world and of ourselves. But such an undertaking is not without peril. The Hölderlin dictum that Jung liked to quote ( Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch ) is also true in reverse. The way up is also the way down.

John says in the Preface that it was done to avoid copyright infringement, but I like my explanation better.

I have to confess that I have never read a comic book or a graphic novel apart from Asterix . And I did enjoy the imaginative retelling of the American industry’s origin in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay when I read it in high school, a sentiment which John does not share .

John has written on Tumblr something to the effect that race is ultimately superficial compared to the cosmic forces of sex and gender. My character A would say that it is typical of a white man to use a pseudoscientific concept such as ‘cosmic forces’ to justify ignoring the lived experiences of actually existing people here on earth. Artistically though, I think it was a wise choice to not to grab hold of too many live wires at once.

A few observation as someone who has never questioned my gender identity as such but who did once buy a THEY|THEM shirt in the giftshop of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam because of the Whitmanesque implications (I may have been stoned), only to give up wearing it because it was too awkward to try and explain that I was not trying to make any claims about my particular identity. Hopefully John will have more success in this vein.

I see the shift from sexual politics to gender politics as of a piece with the more general move away from viewing ourselves as relational beings to a more self-contained approach to understanding our place in the world. Although many progressives still parrot the phrase that gender is a social construct, everybody seems to be fretting about whether there is something essential about one’s gender identity — something perhaps even more essential than one’s sex. John’s female characters are rather sceptical about this proposition:

“We’re really not supposed to be saying ‘he,’” Ellen Chandler said. “Simon says he’s not a man or a woman.” Diane del Greco thought about this proposition for a moment. Finally, with a theatrical scratch of her Caesarian scar, she said, “Give me a fucking break!” She cackled with laughter. This time Ellen Chandler couldn’t help but join her, seized by a fit of laughter that went with the general delirium she was suffering in this overheated house, inside her long coat, where she felt she was being smothered and berated, the coffee burning her empty stomach and making her dizzy. She felt as if her own Caesarian scar were glowing, burning.

My own perspective is that this particular framing of the issue is regrettable, although not inevitable. What I found to be the most useful explanation in The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk (himself no stranger to sexual politics ) was not the predictable invocation of Foucault’s postmodernism or Crenshaw’s intersectionality but rather Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ (which she herself has largely recanted).

It seems to me that the ‘strategic’ part has all but been forgotten. Whereas the ‘born this way’ narrative was successful in promoting greater social acceptance of homosexuality (at least in the West), it has evidently been counterproductive in the case of transgenderism. It is one thing to convince the average person that a little boy was born destined to like other boys, it is quite another to say that the little boy has actually always been a little girl, or has actually always been neither boy nor girl, in some unique way, somewhere inside her/their problematic boy body. And yet activists have refused to change tack — choosing to shame any questioning of this metaphysically dubious proposition, contributing to the politicisation of the issue in a way that has made gender more, and not less, salient in our interaction with others.

Major Arcana is not the last word on gender. But in its gleeful rejection of standpoint theory it demonstrates that, although we may each be trapped inside our own subjectivity, we can and should try to imaginatively put ourselves in the shoes of others, whatever the gender.

And Simone Weil, for that matter.

John has already anticipated criticism that his ending is a bit pat by  saying  he was ‘not going to ask people to read a 160K-word novel that leaves them feeling worse about the world than when they started’.

But does this exhilarating 160K-word novel really make one feel better about the world? About the war in Gaza? Should we be satisfied with the answer given to Job? The novel’s metaphysics turn out to be rather familiar:  Ye shall be as gods… thou shalt not suffer a witch to live… behold, a virgin shall be with child…   greater love hath no man than this … I agree that the likes of Crowley have led us down a blind alley and we have to in a sense go backwards before we can hope to go forwards. But the novel leaves unanswered the question of whether there is a way forward, beyond an imaginative retelling of Judeo-Christian myths. Blake might not have needed the Greeks, but we do. But perhaps this will become clear in the pink utopia.

Or as the girlies, gays and theys say:  yes, and ? ( pop cultural reference courtesy of my gen z boyfriend).

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Major Arcana

• A long-troubled itinerant carpenter returns home to small town Vermont and attempts to build a log cabin by hand, hoping to free himself from a cycle of poverty and addiction.
• A long-troubled itinerant carpenter returns home to small town Vermont and attempts to build a log cabin by hand, hoping to free himself from a cycle of poverty and addiction. But when he reconnects with Sierra, a woman with whom he shares a complicated past, he becomes locked in a desperate struggle between the person he was and the person he hopes to become.

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Set in the backwoods of Vermont, Major Arcana follows an itinerant carpenter's struggle to end a legacy of alcoholism and poverty as he attempts to build a log cabin by hand. His plans are complicated when he reunites with Sierra, a woman with whom he shares a difficult past, and he is forced to reconcile his old life with his new one.

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Major arcana.

2018 Directed by Josh Melrod

Returning to his home town in backwood Vermont, Dink is determined to reclaim control, ending his legacy of alcoholism and constructing his own log cabin by hand. However, Dink’s troubled past, including his gambling mother, Jean and damaged ex-partner, Sierra, threaten to blow him off course.

Ujon Tokarski Tara Summers Lane Bradbury Rachel Donahue Collen Doyle

Director Director

Josh Melrod

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Dax Stringer

Producers Producers

Alan Oxman Sarah Brennan Kolb Teo Zagar

Writer Writer

Editors editors.

Josh Melrod Betsy Kagen

Cinematography Cinematography

Ramsey Fendall

Production Design Production Design

Tucker Capparell

Composer Composer

Songs songs.

Gary Lightbody

Good Deed Entertainment

Alternative Title

Releases by date, 27 sep 2018, 25 oct 2018, 09 oct 2020, 06 nov 2020, releases by country.

• Premiere Raindance Film Festival
• Premiere Austin Film Festival
• Digital Virtual cinemas
• Digital VOD

82 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Sean P. Means ★★★½

Made in Vermont on a budget of pennies and a wealth of soon-to-be-discovered talent, the drama “Major Arcana” is what they once called a “granola movie” — the sort of earnest, introspective regional production that used to dominate the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic competition.

Dink (played by Ujon Tokarski) drives into his former Vermont hometown to collect his inheritance: A beat-up double-wide and the 52 acres of woods on which it sits. These are left to him by his father, who we learn about largely through his horrible housekeeping, his casual attitude about porn, and the amount of beer and liquor Dink pours down the drain.

Read the full review at The Movie Cricket: moviecricket.net/blog/2020/10/8/review-major-arcana-is-a-quietly-moving-drama-of-a-carpenter-confronting-his-past-in-a-vermont-town

Review by Disheveled Baby ★★★½

Slow, methodical, and earnest, I thought Major Arcana was pretty good in its own simple way but probably not a film I’ll be clamoring to revisit anytime soon

Review by Chris Kriofske ★★★½

Josh Melrod is a filmmaker to watch--not only does this micro indie look great, he manages to get good performances from both a first-time actor (Ujon Tokarski) and an established one (Tara Summers). Not a wasted minute in its tight framework as well (thought I could've done w/out the puke.)

Review by Scott Renshaw ★★★½

The simplicity of writer/director Josh Melrod’s narrative is deceiving, as he crafts a subtle “here’s why you can’t come home again” tale. Dink (Ujon Tokarski) is an itinerant carpenter who returns after a four-year absence to the rural Vermont town where he grew up, inheriting his recently-deceased father’s land and deciding to build a cabin on it. A surprising amount of the running time is devoted to the raw labor Dink invests in the construction, a work that takes on an almost ritualistic quality for the recovering alcoholic. But as Dink finds himself drawn back into the orbit of ex-girlfriend Sierra (Tara Summers) and his needy mother (Lane Bradbury), the film becomes a story about how easy it is to…

Review by Matthew ★★★★

I wanna make this movie

Review by ⊹ 𝓳𝓪𝓭𝓮 ࣪ ˖ ★★★½

everyday is a second chance.

Review by toothpickmoe ★★★★

An earnest and heartfelt look at one man’s attempt to put his life back together by returning to his roots. Dink sort of lives up to his name, a recovering alcoholic who returns to his small Vermont hometown to survey his inheritance after his father passed, reconnect with his mother and former girlfriend, and figure out what the hell he’s doing with his life. Ujon Tokarski has no other credits but handles the lead role with a natural comfortability that makes you wonder if it’s more of an autobiography. Josh Melrod, who has more editing credits than anything else, wrote and directed this quietly insightful film, and Tara Summers, a British actor doing an excellent US accent here, rounds out…

Review by murphyobrian ★★★

Wherever you go, there you are.

Review by Erin ★★½

Worth it just to see that giant hammer.

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